Monthly Archives: October 2011

So for November I think I’m going to make some small changes to my daily routines. I’ll walk my two dogs more often that I do now (rarely), I’ll walk to the bus station from uni rather than getting a bus to get a bus, and I’m going to cut down on my caffeine and sugar intake drastically. I might even dust of the Kinect sat downstairs gathering dust; but baby steps first!

Currently I’m midway through A Game of Thrones (which I’m finding far more enjoyable than the TV series which I stopped at episode 4! I’m nearly at where I stopped watching, so it’ll be interesting to see if it can hold my interest in the next few chapters [I’m sure it it]) and I’ve just started Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson as it was delivered this morning.

Image via Wikipedia

The introduction was pretty sad, Steve asked him to write his biography back in 2004 (it turns out soon after he was diagnosed with cancer before it was made public) and Isaacson replied along the lines of “maybe in twenty years when you’ve retired, you have lots more to give”. It took a few years for Isaacson to get started, and now Jobs has sadly passed away the biography has been released. It’s certainly going to be interesting read. There is also an hour long interview with the author which you can find here.

Other things I’m up to include cross-stitching, rearranging my room, installing linux, and pretty much anything to avoid my uni work.

I seem to have a problem. I keep buying games (, books and movies are also included) and then never get around to playing them. I should really have more self control; I even made a list of what games to play by when back over the Summer. Let’s see how that went…

Out of all of those games, I’ve only completed Portal 2. I haven’t even played most of the rest of them at all. I played about three hours of Pokemon Soul Silver, and about an hour of Ocarina of Time, but that’s been about it. Games are just not as enjoyable anymore I guess?

The moral here is not to make gaming into a chore, play when you feel like, and not when you don’t.

Don’t make a list, you probably won’t stick to it and then you’ll end up writing a blog post similar to this one! That being said, I would quite like to complete at least one or two of these before Super Mario 3D Land, and Mario Kart 7 pop through my door in the next few months! Let’s go with Soul Silver (since I only have to beat the Elite 4) and Ocarina of Time 3D (because my 3DS is criminally underused. On the not so portable side, I really want to get into Cthulhu Saves the World again, and possibly Disgaea 3. But it’s not going to happen.

I’ve made space on my PC this week for Linux, in particular Crunchbang. I still dual boot into Windows for games, and currently for Skype as it doesn’t seem to like my microphone very much. Other than that, everything set itself up with minimal fuss. The installer asked if I wanted OpenOffice, and Dropbox took a minor bit of configuration to get going but seems to be pretty stable. Popoplug took a little more configuration but not more than about five minutes and now it starts itself automatically on login.

My PC is so much faster at the things I usually do; browse the web in Chrome. It’s much more secure too, which is a nice feeling. It’s much less cluttered too. If you use windows, and all you do is browsing and maybe office, definately consider switching to Linux; either Crunchbang or something slightly more mainstream such as Ubuntu!

I’ve decided to try my hand at producing a Let’s Play series on YouTube. Probably an early Pokémon game, possibly Yellow or Blue. I spent a few hours yesterday getting the recording down, and settled on using Camstudio to record the video from VisualBoyAdvance in conjunction with Audacity to remove the background noise from my recording. It seems to work pretty well, so here’s the first minute I uploaded to YouTube yesterday with some more coming in the next week!

I’ve had my shiny new kindle for a week now, and having upgraded from a (somewhat) ancient Sony PRS-505 I’m much happier for it. The screen refreshes that much quicker, it doesn’t flash to black on every page turn and some of the bargains I’ve found in the Kindle eBook store are amazing. Tom Reynold’s sequel to his book Blood, Sweat and Tea about the London Ambulance Service is just 49p to download. How much better can it get? 😀 (If you haven’t read them, you should! )

I could of course read books on my phone, or my tablet but to really get into a book and get lost in it, e-ink wins out hands down. Of course, only second to paper. But who likes boring old paper??

I’ve had my shiny new kindle for a week now, and having upgraded from a (somewhat) ancient Sony PRS-505 I’m much happier for it. The screen refreshes that much quicker, it doesn’t flash to black on every page turn and some of the bargains I’ve found in the Kindle eBook store are amazing.

Tom Reynold’s sequel to his book Blood, Sweat and Tea about the London Ambulance Service is just 99p to download. How much better can it get? 😀 (If you haven’t read them, you should! Then you should watch Sirens.

I could of course read books on my phone, or my tablet but to really get into a book and get lost in it, e-ink wins out hands down. Of course, only second to paper. But who likes boring old paper??